This Week in Social and Digital (Week of July 30)
This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.
Twitter Partners with Researchers to Remove Toxicity
Twitter is partnering with researchers to help the platform with its efforts to promote “healthy conversation."
The researchers will be looking at a variety of issues including echo chambers, uncivil discourse and intolerance. The ultimate hope is that the study will help Twitter understand “how communities form around political discussions on Twitter and the challenges that may arise as those discussions develop.” Another group of researchers will be looking at “how exposure to a variety of perspectives and backgrounds can decrease prejudice and discrimination.”
These research studies accompany other efforts by Twitter, such as making abusive content less visible on its platform, with the goal of making the platform less toxic.
Twitter’s taken multiple steps to weed out its worst offenders on the platform and to restrict the reach and pervasiveness of abusive content, but that’s only one side of the issue. Studies like this will, hopefully, help Twitter encourage more positive behavior, rather than just restricting the negative. That’s a big challenge as we’re all infants in this digitally connected world.
While the positive results of increased connectivity were readily apparent at the beginning of the social age, the negative side is just making itself known. This is the beginning of a long process by platforms, like Twitter, and their users to learn how to use them better.
Snapchat Rolls Out Creator-Made Stickers
Snapchat is continuing to do whatever it can to win back the hearts and minds of creators, and its latest effort is a trial of creator-made stickers. These new stickers come in packs, and they’re created by Snapchat creators. Users can access these stickers under the star within the sticker section of the app.
This effort is paired with Snapchat’s Storytellers program, which aims to get brands and influencers working together to create Snapchat campaigns.
This is all about visibility. Snapchat is telling creators that it is the place for them to find a pedestal to reach their audiences, and allowing them to create stickers that become integrated into the app is a big deal. It’s making up for its lack of users compared to Instagram with its flexibility in working with creators, or at least, it’s trying to.
WhatsApp Launches Business API
WhatsApp has launched a Business API that will give businesses the ability to manage and send messages to customers. The messages are limited to non-promotional messages, including appointment reminders, shipping info, purchase receipts, flight updates, event tickets and so on. 90 companies are taking part, including Uber, KLM Airlines and Booking.com.
The API only allows businesses to send messages to customers who have given the business their phone number or have reached out to the business on WhatsApp in the past.
Included in this feature is the ability for advertisers to add click-to-chat buttons to Facebook ads that drive users to WhatsApp, a feature that’s been in testing since December.
WhatsApp is sitting at 1.5 billion users, and Facebook has made no secret of the fact that it aims to monetize its messaging apps, particularly Messenger and WhatsApp. This is particularly important as Facebook is taking steps to make its core platform, Facebook, “better” for users. Often that means taking out features such as the emphasis on content from non-friends. While that content was stickier and kept users coming back to Facebook, it’s been deemed to not be as beneficial for users as content from friends and family.
The more steps Facebook takes like that to its core platform, the more steps it needs to take on its other platforms to monetize its users. Facebook is a cash cow at the moment, but grooming the other “star" platforms to take its place is important for Facebook’s future.
Facebook Courts Game Developers
Facebook’s going out of its way to make sure video game marketers know that it's a way to reach gamers.
The social network launched playable ads. The ads let gamers try a game out in their News Feeds before choosing to download the entire game. Once they preview the game, the ads give users the option to tap to install it.
Facebook’s also testing a retention optimization tool that lets advertisers target ads to users most likely to play their games. The last tool is a minimum return on ad spend bid. This allows advertisers to set a minimum spend to garner players for their products.
Gaming’s a big deal for platforms, and the competition is only getting stiffer. Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook all want a piece of the pie. Letting gamers try a game without downloading it isn’t new, but it is new for Facebook. Facebook’s also going beyond introducing new ad units, it’s giving game developers more tools to optimize their buys with the platform. That makes sense, especially in a space that is as much about driving conversion as it is anything else.
News Quick Hits
Twitter is implementing additional tools for users to report abusive live streams on both Twitter and Periscope. Once live chats are reported, they will be reviewed by a group of moderators who will determine whether or not the live stream can continue. Accounts that routinely violate guidelines can be suspended.
Facebook discovered a campaign it believes is tied to Russia being executed on its platform. The campaign is intended to disrupt midterm elections by spreading content focused on divisive issues. This campaign is notably more sophisticated than Russia’s previous efforts.
Facebook and Instagram have launched new tools that help users see how much time they’re wasting… I mean spending on their platforms. They can also set up reminders to take a break. The features are more focused on awareness for users because they simply give users tools to manage their time. While this won’t cure someone who is actually addicted to social media, it may help others at least be more aware of how much time they’re giving to Facebook. That being said, these features don’t do anything to actually discourage users from accessing the platforms. After all, that would be counter to Facebook’s business model.
Facebook has updated its video metrics. The first update is related to 3-second and 10-second view counts. Now, Facebook will only calculate unrepeated seconds of watch time, cutting out repeat viewers. Second, Facebook has updated its Video Plays metric in the Ads Manager and Ads API to better represent video impressions for videos that display but don’t actually play. This new update only reflects plays. The third update is actually the removal of the 30-second video view and video percentage watch metrics. Those features were viewed as duplicates of others.
Snap is testing Snap Private Marketplace with a handful of Discover partners. This will give those partners the option to offer ad inventory in Snapchat’s Ads Manager.
In other Snapchat news, it's now selling six-second video Commercials programmatically through the self-serve platform and no longer only restricting the ads to being purchased through Snapchat’s sales team. This feature is only available for a handful of advertisers. Commercials run between Snapchat’s Shows within the Discover section of the app and are unskippable.
Snapchat’s launched voice controlled lenses. The lenses respond to specific words.
Apple’s App Store search ads are expanding to six more countries: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Spain. These countries join the United States, Mexico, Canada and the U.K. Apple claims its search ads receive a 50% conversion rate, far better than Google and Facebook.
Google is working with China to launch a censored version of its search engine. The project is code-named Dragonfly, and it's been in the works since spring 2017. It could be launched in the coming months after being reviewed by the Chinese government.
Reddit is in the midst of cleaning up a data breach in which hackers were able to gain access to databases and logs that contained usernames and corresponding email addresses. This means pseudonyms used on Reddit could be matched up to personal email addresses, allowing users to be linked to subreddits they follow.